Thread: Property Wikia - fraud on so many levels

I'm tellin' ya,

the excreta's a whisker away from hitting the fan in PropertyWikia land.

For months, self styled 'net marketing expert, Howard Frenia has been expounding the benefits of joining Property Wikia.

Here's one of his latest missives from November 1:



Read the whole spiel here: Let Realtors Help Explode Your Property Wikia Business | howardfrenia.com

BUT WAIT !!

What a difference 2 weeks can make in the life of a scam.

Here's Frenias' backdown, this time from November 15:



Unfortunately, it's probably too late for the many victims of this fraud to recoup their money, but, they certainly should be trying.

The problem with howie's theory about getting realtors is the same as narc-that ponzi / dna's false premise of collecting license plates. Why is a realtor going to give someone listings when they can do it themselves and collect?

That's been one of the most obvious red flags attached the the Property Wikia scam all along.

Much of the promotional material originally put out by Wikia and its' victi.....err........members, revolved about property owners capitalizing on the benefits and cost savings of self listing on Property Wikia.

Somewhere along the line, members desperate to increase their "listings" started focusing on getting professional realtors involved, thus introducing another layer of people with their hand out if and when a property sold.

The shadowy people behind Property Wikia, meanwhile, couldn't care less who screwed with the system.

They just pocketed the £109 and laughed all the way to the bank.......err........anonymous payment processors and offshore accounts

Mr Frenia is not going to sit back, be content to follow the party line and accept it's "only £109"

He's spreading the message far and wide:



Property Wikia - False Advertising for $450000.00 on 11/15/2011 - Scambook - Scam Reports, Complaints, Class Action Lawsuits.

Another victim speaks up, this time from SCAMORTRUE.com

I notice that super shill Terry Cuthbert hasn't been around lately trying to "set the record straight"...!

It seems that reports of Wikia fraud are expanding, but actually predate this thread by a month or so. This site has a good read on it: Search for "wikia" - Scambook - Scam Reports, Complaints, Class Action Lawsuits.

Property Wikia - YouTube

Property Wikia - False Advertising for $500.00 on 08/17/2011 - Scambook - Scam Reports, Complaints, Class Action Lawsuits.

Following on from Julie Diligent's excellent work, I decided to do some research into the claimed parent company of PropertyWikia ie 3iCatalyst.com.

At the outset I'd like to state that these are my observations only, and that everyone should do their own due dilligence before making any decisions about dealing with PropertyWikia, or indeed any business opportunity, whether web based or not.

OK, so lets look at the website, and see whether it gives us any "Red Flags" ie warnings that something may not be quite right.

It starts with a Flash video, which is rather flash but doesn't really tell us anything. One thing I did notice is that the company logo makes a clear separation between 3i and Catalyst. Almost as if it was trying to suggest a link with 3i, which is "a multinational private equity and venture capital company" with "total assets under management of £12.7 billion as at 31 March 2011" (Source: Wikipedia.org)

But for now, let's be generous and assume that this is just a coincindence. We could be extra generous and suggest that the similarity between the seemingly unknown "RMV Group" and Rightmove plc is also a coincidence. According to Wikipedia, "Rightmove plc (LSE: RMV) is a British-based company that runs rightmove.co.uk UK's number one property website for properties for sale and to rent, an online real estate portal. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index". Is it just unfortunate that the RMV group (that PropertyWikia claims to be part of) has the same name as Rightmove plc's stock ticker, or are they trying to steal credibility from another company?

But, back to the website. After the flash has completed, the main element of the screen is a login feature for current users to login. Now this seems strange to me - this is prime real estate that a website should be using to get its message across; a user login is normally in a much less prominent position on a web site. Let's move on (but I reserve the right to come back here later).

Below the Login button are two links: "Cannot log in?" and "Lost Username or Password". These are both standard features of a login screen and add credibility. However, if you hover your mouse over the links you'll see that they are both "mailto:" links. This means that they will create an email in your default email client software, with the appropriate subject. This is really strange - any normal 'forgot username or password' facility would take you through screens prompting for your email address and/or memorable information and then allow you to reset your password or be sent an email reminder. The idea that they handle this by you sending them an email is absurd. The only reason for an email link is that it looks convincing, and is very easy for them to code.

If you try to login by making up a username and password, you'll get a message that the username and/or password is incorrect - which is what you'd expect, since you don't have a valid username or password, do you? However, did you notice that this warning came back instantaneously? More on this later!

When I first looked at this website (several weeks ago) it featured logos of many well known companies, such as play.com (I can't remember the others), but strangely these have disappeared. I wonder why, since it was a very impressive list of companies, that any organisation would be delighted to be associated with.

The footer of the page shows the company address - the "London Docklands" part doesn't look right. Most businesses in this area would not include that as part of the address, but if you don't know London habits, or are trying to impress people that may have heard of London Docklands then you would. Also, in the UK we would write the address as "25 Canada Square, Canary Wharf" and not "Canary Wharf, 25 Canada Square".

Surely I'm not suggesting the site was written by someone with a first language other than English? Hmmm.

Strangely, there is no telephone, fax or email addresses listed. I then did a search for 3icatalyst using yell.com, but it didn't find any matches. How weird is that?

I could not see any indication of the company legal status - I would expect a company that "handles investments of £12.5 Billion GBP" to be a PLC or at least a limited company, and therefore to have a company registration number, but I couldn't see one anywhere. For comparison, click on the '3i Group plc' link at the bottom left of the 3i.com home page - If 3icatalyst is a genuine company then I would expect it to have something similar.

Let's now look at the options at the top of the 3icatalyst screen. These are 'CONTACT 3ICATALYST', 'HAVE AN IDEA?', 'NEED HELP!', 'DEVELOPERS' and 'PRE-REGISTRATION' The first 3 do nothing more that open an email addressed to the relevant email address such as contact@3icatalyst.com. Using mailto links here is dodgy - it suggests that the web site has been thrown together as quickly and cheaply as possible.

Also, I would expect that any decent website would use a contact page to list all of the contact details - have a look at the Contact page of 3i.com for comparison.

The next option is DEVELOPERS and it's rather interesting. This appears to be a recruitment page for 'Web Design and Developers' (not Web Designers, by the way). This is odd - why would a group that "handles investments of £12.5 Billion GBP" (their claim) be "looking for talented web designers and developers"? To me, this doesn't make any sense (unless they're desperate to find someone to make their website more convincing!), but let's be open minded and see what they're looking for.

The screen has over 20 checkboxes for different web 'skills' and this looks fine if you don't know much about web design and development (which is the case for most people). However, if you work work in IT as I do, you'll notice that some of the skills are rather strange. For example, I'm sure no-one would ever describe themself as (or recruit for) a "Middleweight XML Coder" - XML is used by many software developers, but I've never heard of an "XML Coder" and to further define it as Middleweight seems ridiculous.

Further down, in the section about "projects you've worked on" it asks for "You're Role" despite correctly spelling "Your" earlier in the page. Do you not think that a company that "handles investments of £12.5 Billion GBP" would proof-read its website? I do.

OK - still with me? well done for persevering!

The final option on the website is 'PRE-REGISTRATION'. This displays a selection of wordy, and in some cases badly written, descriptions.
Can you make any sense of this?

"Get your essential start up business capital, turnaround your distressed company, buy a company out, sell your business, merge with other businesses to seamlessly add and maximise their valuable assets amongst a profusion of other expert in-house services we offer businesses large and small"

Sounds like gibberish to me!

Then there's this:

"Additionally 3iCatalyst are currently delivering £8.3 Billion GBP ‘new style’ funding to worldwide residential and commercial property developers"

Do you not think that funding of that magnitude would be front page news across the world in the current depressed property markets? The only reference I could find was a suspicious looking 'press release' on free-press-release.com.

And this means that they are handling investments of £20.8 Billion GBP - a staggering amount of money that would surely justify them being a household name.

Still with me - you're doing well - I've saved what may be the best bit to the end ...

Remember when I mentioned the Current User login feature? (I know, you were much younger then!)
Most browsers, including IE and Firefox offer a method to view the source of the page. In IE it's View - Source.
Let's try that with 3icatalyst.com
You'll see a mixture of HTML, CSS and Javascript - incidentally this is considered very poor programming - they really should be in separate files (maybe they can recruit a good web developer from somewhere?).

Scroll down beyond half way and you'll find a section starting "function introDone()"
Look for

<input type="button" name="login" value="Login" onclick="doLogin()"

This means that when you click on the Login button it will call a javascript function called doLogin - this is fine.

Now scroll down to "function doLogin()"
The first part of this starts with // meaning that it's a comment and can be ignored.
The next line starting

document.getElementById("flashcontent").innerHTML = '<div

is the interesting one.
What this does is replace an area of the page with the html that follows, and that includes the warning about the incorrect username or password. But there's no sign of the login being sent to a server for validation, and no "if" statement to handle a successful login.

Basically, you can enter any username and password you like - it does nothing with it and immediately tells you that it is incorrect. So either the login is broken (which would be extremely generous of you) OR It was never intended to work at all - just to give the mpression of a login screen which, on the surface, looks the part. This seems to be a recurring theme throughout the site. It looks plausable until you start to think and investigate and look 'behind the scenes'.

Now scroll down to near the end and you'll find a large section that is commented out (just after "You need to upgrade your Flash Player"). Here you'll find the missing section where all the company logos used to be, with the heading "Some of the Clients we participate with, fund or advise"
These include: rightmove, blackberry, easyjet, BP, Virgin, Yahoo, facebook and many other hugely impressive companies.

The most interesting entry is this one:

<area shape="rect" coords="442,71,568,97" id="rightmove" alt="rightmove" href="http://www.propertywikia.com" target="_blank" />

ie they were originally using the rightmove.co.uk logo, but subsequently changed the logo and link to the propertywikia.com website.
But they didn't change the id and tag - which is either lazy or intended to suggest a relationship between rightmove and propertywikia.

For some reason, they've decided it's no longer appropriate to show the logos (any ideas why?) and simply commented them out instead of doing it properly by removing them from the code. I've attached the .png files from the archived website as 3icat001_01.png and the current (but commented out) one as 3icat001_02.png for comparison.

So, how many Red Flag warnings so far? That's up to you to decide, but for me it's way too many to have any confidence in 3icatalyst as a genuine company, and by association, casts the same doubts on "RMV Group" and "PropertyWikia".


If you'd like to do some more research on 3icatalyst, then I'd suggest trying the following enquiries:
1. Is the company registered at Companies House? If so what is their Company Number?
2. Is the company Vat Registered? If so what is the Vat Number?
3. Do a web search for "25 Canada Square" and call any of the companies there and ask about 3icatalyst
4. Do a side by side comparison of 3i.com and 3icatalyst.com websites - they appear to be in the same business and their assets under management are almost identical (strange that) so their websites will be broadly similar, right?
5. Do a search on google for 3i (about 22 million hits) and 3icatalyst (about 3,000 hits) - Hmmm.
6. Be objective and honest - do you really believe anything about 3icatalyst?
7. Take the time to do your own due dilligence - it might save you a small amount of money, a large amount of time, and a huge amount of credibility!
8. Contact some of the companies that 3icatalyst previously claimed to "participate with, fund or advise", especially rightmove.
I'm sure they'll be willing to confirm or deny this.
9. If you know a web developer, ask them to review the site and see if they agree with my observations.

Good luck, and be dilligent .

Welcome to RealScam.com Fred.

What an excellent first post, thanks for your input.

Any more red flags, and Property Wikia would blow away on the next windy day.

EAT SPECIAL REPORT: Propertywikia website and the mystery of its rich rewards - Estate Agent Today

Property Wikia - Property Tribes

Originally Posted by littleroundman

Welcome to RealScam.com Fred.

What an excellent first post, thanks for your input.

Any more red flags, and Property Wikia would blow away on the next windy day.

May I second that! A hearty Texas welcome!

No doubt Terry Cuthbert will pop in again and respond.

Soapboxmom

Here's the latest from Scambook.com



Note the numbers circled in red:

8 Filed Reports and $451,402 in Total Reported Damages.

Property Wikia Have You Heard Of Them ? | PropertyInvesting.com

Me just enjoying the free marketing. I got 27 new members in my programs today. People love being paid when they making money.

I thnak everyone for the FREE marketing as people love to see someone get off the fllor and get on with life!!

YEHA YOU GUYS ROCK BRING IT ON

Originally Posted by terrycythbert

Me just enjoying the free marketing. I got 27 new members in my programs today. People love being paid when they making money.

I thnak everyone for the FREE marketing as people love to see someone get off the fllor and get on with life!!

YEHA YOU GUYS ROCK BRING IT ON

Sure! And, I am going to be the next Pope!!!

Soapboxmom

Originally Posted by Soapboxmom

Sure! And, I am going to be the next Pope!!!

Soapboxmom

Hate to point this out, Mum, but Popes are always male...(Ailn't sayin' it's right, just sayin' it's so..) As for 'terrycythbert' we've seen hundreds of varieties of his BS before and will again.!

There's one very good thing about being a commentator in this arena.

All it takes is a tiny bit of patience and the problem takes care of itself.

The "Terry Cuthberts" of this world are forced, by their own hand, to slink away into the ether.

Whether Cuthbert disappears or reinvents himself under a new name after Property Wikia implodes, as we all know it will, there's enough mud attached to his reputation now to keep him dirty for years.

Future "naysayers" have half their job done for them, already.

Originally Posted by laidback

Hate to point this out, Mum, but Popes are always male...

You're catchin on.......

Originally Posted by laidback

Hate to point this out, Mum, but Popes are always male...(Ailn't sayin' it's right, just sayin' it's so..)

And yet, there's STILL more chance of there being a "Pope Mom" than there is of Property Wikia being legit.

STILL the slide continues.

Property Wikia - False Advertising for $219.40 on 11/03/2011 - Scambook - Scam Reports, Complaints, Class Action Lawsuits.

Q: What do hackers do when they're not attacking HYIPs ???

A: Why, hack Property Wikias' bank account, that's what:



If you believe THAT, then you'll believe anything


http://www.scambook.com/report/view/19446/Propertywikia-False-Advertising-for-$109.00-on-08-31-2011#comment-7778